This reference documents the ActionScript packages and classes from Flash CS4, Flex 4 (Gumbo), Flash Player 10, AIR 1.5, ColdFusion 9, and LiveCycle Data Services 3. So if you use more than one of these products you no longer have to jump around from reference to reference. You can find it all in one place.

There is also some nifty filtering logic in place so you can hide content from products or runtimes you're not interested in. You can even step down to previous product versions.

This is still in beta, and there is a feedback link on the site, so please have a look and let the team know what you think.

This example shows how to display a list of links in a Flex List control and let the user click on the list items navigate to the links.

A friend of mine recently built a photo gallery application. She wanted to load an external list of URLs representing photo album pages, so she could change the URLs in the future without rebuilding the app. The following technique worked pretty well for her project.

The following code declares a set of links in XML, binds them to a Flex List control, and then opens up each linked page in a new browser window when the user clicks an item in the list.

The links are declared in an XMLList variable. You can enhance this example pretty easily to grab the XML from an external file and use that to populate the list.

The List control binds directly to the itemXml variable. If you want the List display will change automatically if the XML data changes, put the data into a XMLListCollection variable instead and bind to that.

The List's itemClick event triggers the onItemClick() method. Note that even though it's listening for "itemClick" the handler method receives a ListEvent object, not an ItemClickEvent object.

The onItemClick() method grabs the clicked item's url property using the E4X @ operator. Then it invokes the navigateToURL() method to open up that URL in a new browser window.

The resulting control could be used in an HTML frameset to switch the content in another frame. Just change the value '_blank' in the navigateToURL() method to the name of the appropriate frame.

The good news is that you don't have to wait for the official Flex 4 release to use the new version of ASDoc. It's already available for testing (please let us know if you find any bugs!). Just download a recent nightly build of the Adobe Flex 4 SDK from the Gumbo downloads page. You will find the latest asdoc executable in the bin/ folder.

It's been hard to find a good set of AS3 coding standards in the past but this fits the bill. It's pretty thorough even though there are a few sections still marked TBD. It covers naming standards, language usage, file organization, and code formatting.

Even if you don't agree with all the standards, this is a great starting point for any project team that's embarking on a big Flex, Flash, or ActionScript project. You can just use the Adobe standards as a baseline and tweak as necessary.